Part 8 (1/2)

THE CHURCH IN AFRICA

[Sidenote: The Church in North Africa.]

In the middle of the fifth century the Christian power in North Africa fell under the domination of the Arian Vandals. S. Augustine died in 430 while the foe was at the gates of his city. In 439 Carthage fell, and Roman civilisation was extinguished. The rule of the Vandals was not only Arian but barbarous. It is not unlikely that their victory was won with the aid of the remaining Donatists and the heathen Moors.

With the reign of Gaiseric some degree of toleration was allowed to the Catholic Church, but the persecution which had marked the earlier days of the Arian power now took the form of confiscation and the suppression of public wors.h.i.+p. The Church suffered grievously, and not least in the cla.s.s of persons ordained to the ministry and consecrated to the episcopate. But still the Catholics were the great majority, and it was seen that the Arian Vandals were in danger of absorption by the subtle influence of the truth. It was a last effort of Gaiseric's to deprive the Catholics of their leaders, which eventually brought about their restoration. The Bishop of Carthage and several of his clergy were put on board a s.h.i.+p and told to escape whither they could.

They reached Naples, {104} and their piteous plight and the news they brought helped to direct the attention of the imperial power to its lost heritage. [Sidenote: The Vandal persecution.] Meanwhile the suffering Church, enjoying now a scanty toleration, now suffering a severer persecution, continued to make converts and to produce martyrs.

In 477 Gaiseric died. A year before his death he had allowed the Catholics to reopen their churches and to bring back their bishops and clergy from exile. And still their missionary efforts had never been relaxed. Church life still continued; inscriptions remaining to-day preserve the epitaphs of men buried in the darkest days with Catholic rites; and in the interior ancient monasteries remained undisturbed.

Hunneric, the next Vandal king, though nominally an Arian, set himself to extirpate heresies which he did not accept: Manichaeans under his sway received treatment more severe than Catholics. Indeed, the Catholics began to raise their heads under the leaders.h.i.+p of Eugenius, who was elected in 479 to the see of Carthage, the only bishopric in the country which held metropolitan rank. The Bishop of Carthage was the spiritual head of the whole province, held a superiority over the bishops outside the limits of Proconsularis, and was, as it were, the patriarch of the African Church. For twenty-three years the see had had no pastor, and the restoration marked a distinct step towards the ending of the Vandal domination. But there was a final effort; Hunneric, unable to decoy the Catholics, determined to exterminate them; a writer of the time tells that nearly five thousand clergy were banished to the desert, where their fate was a practical martyrdom. A conference was {105} summoned in 484, at which it was endeavoured to make the Catholic clergy abate the strictness of their orthodoxy, but Eugenius stood firm. Persecution again followed. The writer already mentioned, Victor Vitensis, says, ”The Vandals did not blush to set forth against us the law which formerly our Christian emperors had pa.s.sed against them and other heretics for the honour of the Catholic Church, adding many things of their own as it pleased their tyrannical power.” Thus evil deeds bring their necessary consequences. A bitter persecution swept over the land, and till the death of Hunneric, at the end of the year, atrocities of the most terrible kind were perpetrated.

It was a brief age of martyrs, and rooted the Church more firmly in the affections of its children. It was an age, too, of saints, and Fulgentius s.h.i.+nes out by the side of Eugenius as a pattern of Christian devotion and asceticism. In the years that followed king succeeded king, and the condition of the Church became gradually more tolerable, till under Hilderic much of the old organisation was restored and the monastic houses were established in a condition of considerable independence. When Gelimer usurped the Vandal throne, the power of Justinian was able to intervene, and in 533 Belisarius recovered North Africa for the Empire. [Sidenote: Reconquest of Africa by Belisarius, 533.] The restoration of the direct rule of the emperors was of necessity the restoration of Catholicism to dominance. But materially the Church had received blows from which she never fully recovered.

Her possessions, buildings, treasures had for the most part pa.s.sed from her hands: and many sees, many parishes, {106} still remained without pastors. Such was the result of ”the violent captivity of a century.”

[Sidenote: The revival of the North African Church.]

Justinian aimed at restoring all things to their first estate. ”We would be the guardians and defenders of the ancient traditions,” he wrote in 542 to the primate of Byzacene. He confirmed the Bishop of Carthage in his metropolitan dignity; he restored sees, allowed synods to meet, gave special privileges to the clergy. An era of church building set in, and fine monasteries were erected, in all the impressive solidity of the Byzantine style, even in distant parts of the Roman territory. Tebessa remains a marvellous example of the wealth and dignity which came anew to the North African Church. The literary power of the Church revived with her material prosperity: a school of writers arose again in the land of Augustine. Primasius, Facundus, Liberatus, Victor of Tonnenna, were among those who restored the activity and knowledge of the Church in history, theology, and apologetic. Over all the emperor Justinian kept his watchful eye, directing, interfering, exhorting, as seemed to him good. The controversy of the Three Chapters had its echoes in Africa, and the deacon Ferrand, a learned theologian, represented a very wide feeling when, in his _Defensio_, he deprecated any condemnation of the dead theologians; and in Facundus, Bishop of Hermiane, the unhappy hesitating pope Vigilius found an adviser who, if anyone, might have given him firmness. In the result, the emperor, by the pen at least as much as the sword, overpowered resistance, and Africa accepted the decisions of Constantinople. Reparatus, Bishop of Carthage, who resisted, was deposed, Liberatus {107} preserves the record of bitter persecution, and Victor of Tonnenna, who equally refused to accept the decision against the Three Chapters, is especially bitter in his denunciation of Justinian. But the pope Pelagius was able, in 560, to announce the a.s.sent of Africa to the statements of the Fifth General Council. The Church from the death of Justinian settled down in peaceable habitations, strong in the imperial support and the affection of the people. But as, in the relaxation which set in as time went on, the power of the imperial administration decayed, the power of the popes in Africa was gradually strengthened, and the power of the bishops rose equally. But this was not all. In time relaxation set in in the Church as well as in the State. There are tales of immoral and corrupt bishops, of disobedience to authority, of a recrudescence, from 591 to 596, of Donatism. It was the pope Gregory the Great who took in hand the needed reformation. [Its relation to Gregory the Great.] His letters are full of African affairs: his keen attention, his instructions to Hilarus, the administrator of the Roman Church's possessions in Italy, his minute knowledge, his wise understanding of the many difficult problems which beset the Church, are prominent in his correspondence. It was he who reversed the conception of Justinian in regard to the Church of North Africa. The emperor had striven for orthodoxy, without the supremacy of the pope. Gregory was determined to secure the latter, and the history of North Africa affords an excellent example of how the papal power grew. It was by continual intervention, in affairs small as well as great, and by constant solicitude: it was by the use of prudent {108} and sympathetic agents, and the firm adherence to a policy of charity, orthodoxy and discretion, that the great pope enforced his views on the bishops, the Church, the imperial representatives. While he sternly rebuked all abuse of the political authority which had fallen into the hands of the bishops, he tenaciously clung to the right of hearing appeals in cases between churchmen and public officials which circ.u.mstances had placed in his hands. From a right of control he pa.s.sed to a right of direct intervention; and in State as well as Church the administrators felt the power of his indomitable will. While disorganisation was spreading in the civil order the Church was growing in concentration and authority.

[Sidenote: The Monothelite controversy.]

But the Monothelite controversy went far to shatter the power which the labour of Gregory had built up, and with it the Christianity of Northern Africa. The orthodox felt less and less bound to emperors who supported heresy, and the Arab invasion drew near without the people perceiving the full extent of their danger. Fortunatus, Bishop of Carthage, declared himself a Monothelite, but in every other province besides his the Church formally repudiated the heresy. In 646 Fortunatus was deposed and Victor succeeded him; and this is almost the last recorded incident in the history of the North African Church. As the Arab invader advanced, refugees from Syria and Egypt poured into the land, and, since many of them were heretical, added to the religious diffusions of the country. The abbat Maximus upheld the banner of orthodoxy against all comers. The victory which he won over the heresiarch Pyrrhus in 645, followed by the declarations of {109} provincial synods in 646, was the last expression of African orthodoxy.

John, the Jacobite bishop of Nikiu, whose contemporary account of the Saracen conquest is of the first value, declares that ”everyone said that the expulsion of the Romans and the victory of the Mussulmans were brought about by the tyranny of the emperor Heraclius and the troubles which he made the orthodox suffer.” A general discontent with the Byzantine government arose, and Rome, which was more in sympathy with the people, was unable to help them. In 646 the patrician Gregory, the imperial governor, orthodox and a protector of the Church, declared that the Monothelite Constans II. had forfeited the throne, and a.s.sumed for himself the t.i.tle of emperor. Within a year he was defeated and slain by the Saracens at Sbeitla, and Byzantine Africa was placed at the mercy of the Muhammadan invader. The Copts long resisted, but their resistance was overcome in the autumn of 646. Alexandria fell a second time and finally into the hands of the Arabs.

[Sidenote: The conquest by the Muhammadans.]

For fifty years the Byzantine power maintained a foothold, precarious and nominal. Inch by inch, and with intervals of repose and even of reconquest,--as when John the Patrician, under Leo the Isaurian, recaptured Carthage,--the infidels advanced, and the Berber tribes of the interior pressed, too, upon the Christians. Carthage was again taken by the Muhammadans in 698: the native tribes joined the invaders, and by 708 Roman Africa was wholly in their hands. Toleration was at first allowed; but from 717 the Christians had only the choice of banishment and {110} apostasy. Still many held out: Christian villages remained, Christian communities, as late as the fourteenth century; and even now it is said that in some parts Christian customs survive. The Church at Carthage existed certainly in some organised form till the eleventh century, and it was not till 1583 that the Church of Tunis was utterly destroyed.

Meanwhile events in other parts of Africa had run a different course.

The patriarchate of Alexandria had a long and distinguished history, and from it had spread missions far into the south.

[Sidenote: The Jacobites.]

The Monophysite controversy led to the founding of the Jacobite sect.

Secret consecrations at Constantinople by bishops in prison during Justinian's severe rule sent a bishop to Hira for the Arabian Christians in Persia, and another to the borders of Edessa, who founded the Jacobites and with the a.s.sistance of Egyptian Monophysite bishops continued the episcopal succession. In Egypt there arose the division between the Melkites, who followed the imperial orders and accepted the decisions of the Councils, and the Copts, who dissented. The Monophysites of Syria, Egypt, and Armenia, with temporary and superficial differences, remained practically at one. National differences confirmed their divergence from the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. Thus while in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere the Church was still powerfully represented, though side by side with strong sectarian organisations, there were, when the followers of Muhammad came to add to the confusion, three nationalistic and heretical bodies, separate from the Church--those of Persia and Armenia and Ethiopia. Of the last something must now be said.

{111}

[Sidenote: The Abyssinian Church.]

South of Egyptian territory, properly so called, lay the Ethiopians, va.s.sals of Egypt, tracing in a dim fas.h.i.+on their Christianity back to one of those queens who bore the t.i.tle of _Candace_. These wild and warring tribes kept up continual conflict, and among the Blemmyes men still wors.h.i.+pped Isis in the temple of Philae. In 548 began the conversion of the n.o.badae of the Soudan, of whose reception into the Christian fold the great Monophysite missionary, John of Ephesus, gives an account. Churches were built, and one inscription at least survives with the name of a Christian king. Beyond them the Alodaei learnt the faith from the same preacher, Longinus. Nubia, or Mugurrah, was also visited by Christian missionaries at the same time. Under Justinian, the temple of Philae was turned into a church, and the Blemmyes became Christian. Christian remains long existed, even down to the neighbourhood of Khartoum; and it was long before the Muhammadan conquerors swept all the wors.h.i.+p of Christ away. Further south Christianity spread on both sides of the Red Sea. In Arabia Felix was the kingdom of the Homerites or Himyarites, whose chief city was Safar, and at different times they were ruled by the same king as the land of Axum, ”the farthest Ind” of the Greek chronicler Theophanes. After the dispersion, Jewish colonies settled in Arabia, and in the fourth century Christianity followed. At the end of the fifth century a bishop is found among the Homerites, and a Trinitarian inscription is dated 542-3. About the same time the Church in Abyssinia, founded in the time of S. Athanasius, received the national religion of the country through the conversion of the Negus at the end {112} of the fifth century. While the land of Safar at times relapsed into heathenism and ma.s.sacred Christians, the Abyssinians remained firm in the faith. Procopius tells that Ellesthaeos, an Ethiopian king, during the reign of Justin I., invaded the land of the Homerites to avenge their persecutions and to suppress the Jewish predominance and set up a Christian king. With him and his successors Justinian entered into treaties, as also with the kings of Axum or Abyssinia. While the Muhammadan conquest swept away the Christianity of the Arabians and drove those who clung to it northward to the banks of the Euphrates, the Church in Abyssinia, which had accepted Monophysitism, remained independent, just as its mother church of Egypt obtained toleration.

It still continues separate, Monophysite, and in communion with the Coptic Church of Egypt.

{113}

CHAPTER X

THE CHURCH IN THE WESTERN ISLES

[Sidenote: Christianity in Britain.]

When Gregory the Great sent Augustine and his brother monks to preach to the Teutonic tribes which had made Britain their home, there were already two Churches in the island. There was the Church of the Brythons, gradually separated by the advance of the Saxons into the Churches of c.u.mbria or Strathclyde, Wales, and West Wales or Cornwall.